NOTE: There are spoilers ahead for God of War (2018).
God of War: Ragnarok’s reveal trailer was a surprisingly packed one, and ended up revealing way more story and gameplay details than most would have expected. Specifically where the combat is concerned – which, of course, is a core pillar of any God of War game – director Eric Williams has spoken about how it is going to be more vertical, and allow players to be more expressive thanks to a wider range of tools to play around with.
At the same time, as the game’s reveal trailer showed, there will also be quite a few freshly introduced mechanics that will be quite familiar to series fans. Speaking in an interview with Kaptain Kuba, Williams said that specifically where the Blades of Chaos are concerned, the development team decided to bring back “the greatest hits of things [they] didn’t get to” in the previous game.
“We had a little bit of a down window between [God of War] 2018 finishing and getting the story spun up for [Ragnarok],” Williams said. “There was this part, I would say two months, maybe three months, where we opened everything up to the team. We had this thing called the idea box, and anybody could submit ideas on what they wanted, and there was just so much of people being like, ‘Since we brought the Blades back halfway through the last game, we didn’t quite get to bring it back 100%.’
“So there were so many ideas, like ‘oh, we should bring back the grapple,’ or ‘we should bring back the chain pull’, or what we call combo 5B, where [Kratos] latches guys out of the air and slams them down. There were just so many ideas that were like old stuff, and it was like, okay, let’s go through the greatest hits of things we didn’t get to, let’s bring those back. So there was a lot of that on the team.”
In the same interview, Cory Barlog, creative director of God of War (2018), revealed that it was his decision to the end the series’ Norse saga after just two games, and explained why that decision was made. Read more about that through here.
Other gameplay-focused details on God of War: Ragnarok have also been emerging, such as the inclusion of two new Valkyries and multiple Einherjar.
God of War: Ragnarok will launch some time in 2022 for PS5 and PS4.